missing keys and broken strings
by alinaandalion
Summary: Music is her first love. Acting, grifting, art, that all comes later. But, music, she hears it everywhere, feels it flow underneath words and actions, and it shapes the world around her.


Her fascination with music starts with a piano. She's seen her father play it, mostly on holidays, but occasional Sunday afternoons when he's in a good mood, and she tiptoes around it, running her chubby child fingers over gleaming polished wood. Occasionally, she even lets one finger, only ever just one, push down a key.

The sound is jarring, melodious, and it ends the second she snatches her hand away and runs out of the room.

Eventually, though, Sophie becomes bolder, and she pushes her fingers into awkward contortions, mimicking the way she's seen her father play.

It always disappoints her when the notes she plays clash and grate against each other, so she begs her parents for piano lessons.

They give in when she turns eight.

* * *

At the age of ten, Sophie unceremoniously quits her piano lessons.

She has a tendency to use people until she learns what she wants, and then she's done with them. This turns into a habit as she gets older, but at ten-years-old, Sophie sees no reason to continue with lessons when she can read any note on the treble or bass staff, knows the different meters, can identify any major or minor key.

The rest is only refining technique, and she certainly doesn't need a teacher for that. She possesses an unusual amount of self-control and discipline for her age after all.

However, the loss of the piano lessons triggers something inside Sophie's mother, who decides that if Sophie is no longer interested in playing the piano, she should take up a new instrument. And in a turn of events that Sophie completely doesn't understand the logic of, she is sent off to viola lessons.

Sophie hates the viola. She loathes the bow that scrapes half-heartedly against thick strings, the awkward cramp that develops in her hand after only a half-hour of holding the instrument properly, the calluses that start to assert themselves only after miserable lessons where the strings cut into her fingers, sometimes even pulling blood to the surface.

She tries pleading, manipulation, temper tantrums to convince her mother that she _does not_ want these lessons. When none of these work, Sophie takes her 12-inch long viola up to her room and calmly breaks it into tiny pieces that she then deposits on the kitchen table.

The viola lessons stop.

* * *

Music is her first love. Acting, grifting, art, that all comes later. But, music, she hears it everywhere, feels it flow underneath words and actions, and it shapes the world around her.

And she guards it close to her heart jealously. Sophie learns early on to be a selfish lover and careful to keep her secrets buried. This is something that is hers, life that sparks and glows inside her, and not just anyone has a right to understand this about her, to hear the harmonies laced through her veins.

Her fingers caress piano keys, black on ivory, and even when she tires of sheet music and counting beats in her head, she trips her fingers from bass to treble through G major and back down in F minor. The patterns become instinctual, chord structures breaking down and re-forming behind her eyes when school lessons drag on.

Perhaps what she mourns the most when she leaves her home is the piano in the living room with its aged yellow keys, falling out of tune, the wood scratched and dull.

* * *

"Do you ever think we'll stop doing this?" Tara asks with a laugh as she traces a finger along the line of Sophie's hip.

"Is it too much for you?" Sophie replies, smiling and leaning in to press her lips to Tara's neck.

Tara laughs and hooks her fingers in Sophie's underwear. "Give me all you've got, Soph."

There's a slight rip of fabric, and Sophie tenses for a moment underneath Tara, fingers curling into blonde hair, air rushing through her lungs. Tara turns her head and brushes her lips against the corner of Sophie's mouth, and everything flows out in one breath.

Things have always been this way with Tara. Tara is _dangerous_, all blonde hair and long legs and eyes that promise the world, and she makes a foreign drumbeat thrum right underneath Sophie's skin, inexorable and burning like fire. Notes slip off Tara's fingertips, spinning and dizzying; it all plays in a syncopated rhythm that makes every breath stutter past Sophie's lips.

For a moment, right before Tara's fingers press in just the right place and Sophie tumbles over the edge, Sophie thinks she could fall in love with her.

* * *

Sophie stares down at her phone and frowns at yet another scathing review of her performance in _The Sound of Music_. Parker, Hardison, and Eliot are out at the bank, intimidating the manager, and Nate is currently getting his third cup of coffee.

She considers pointing out that replacing one addiction with another isn't actual recovery but decides it's not worth the fight.

"Another bad review?"

Sophie looks up as Nate slides into the chair beside her and sighs. "Yeah. My biggest failure yet."

He reaches over and tugs the phone out of her hands, tossing it to the side. His lips quirk into a slight smile, and he says, "I thought you were brilliant."

His smile widens into something blinding, but before she can respond, his phone rings so he gets up to answer it.

Nate's apartment is still at the moment, but it's not quiet even now. She's half-listening to the chatter of the other three. Parker screeches something, incidentals trilling out of nowhere that will later swing without warning into minor chords, and Eliot growls in response. There's something special about Eliot, a melancholy melody that barely comes through over frantically strummed guitar strings and a foreboding bass drum promising destruction.

Hardison is the brightness of them, all major chords and dizzying sixteenth notes that turn into thirty-two second runs when he's operating off of two hours of sleep and more orange soda than she ever thought it possible for one person to consume.

But Nate, Nate fascinates her like no one else ever has. He moves through her life with close harmonies that scrape painfully before resolving, funeral dirges, notes flying off the end of the staff into uncharted territory.

She listens to Nate hum "Do, Re, Mi" under his breath, and a spider-thin crack forms inside of her, widening with each note.

* * *

The problem with everything, though, is that Sophie realizes that for all that is going right in her life, something is terribly wrong. All those cracks that have opened inside her have turned into a gaping hole, and she realizes an awful truth.

All the music, every note she hears in the world around her, she can't find anything inside herself. It's as though she is a conductor who steps up to the orchestra pit only to see that it has been abandoned and there's only a whisper of what could have been echoing back to her.

The hollowness radiates out of her; this is the point where it all breaks down. Everything she has relied on, believed in, it betrays her. In the back of her mind, a dull wooden piano sits, half-broken with frayed strings inside and broken keys that stick in places.

The world has fallen silent, and she is alone.


End file.
